These feet ache. It’s the unexpected warmth of October. I’m trekking up Broadway, journeying from Village Works bookshop to Rizzoli, and then onward to The Strand. At each stop, the task is the same: sign copies of my new book, Love and Money, Sex and Death, and capture some photos for social media. This is the author’s hustle, the modern reality of book promotion, a kind of literary Autozone where writers try to connect with readers directly.
Yet, let’s be honest, this isn’t truly a sustainable living. The ability to write books comes from the stability of a day job, a tenured professorship. Book sales are supplementary, helpful but not essential for covering New York rent and supporting dependents. While the inclination might be to write solely for a niche audience, there’s a desire, driven by complex motivations, to see this book find a wider readership. Hence, the book tour, the signings, the social media push – a somewhat paradoxical endeavor for someone with Marxist leanings.
This struggle with the business side of writing isn’t an indictment of capitalism itself. Drawing from past experiences as a music journalist in the 80s, it’s clear that bands who cultivated their own audience had greater negotiating power and “creative freedom” when dealing with record labels after achieving commercial success. Perhaps this, or simply a middle-class upbringing, instilled a pragmatic approach to the book trade. There’s no pretense of aristocratic detachment; the work of promoting one’s book is willingly embraced, even if it leads to aching feet. This hands-on experience offers invaluable insights into the workings of the book market, a veritable Autozone of literary commerce.
The complete title is Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir. However, to call it strictly a memoir is a simplification, a marketing concession aimed at aiding booksellers. Even without the subtitle, categorization is inevitable. Markets function through categories, and the book market utilizes BISAC – Book Industry Standards and Communications – categories. For Love and Money, Sex and Death, the assigned categories are “Biography and Autobiography / LGBTQ+ / Personal Memoirs” and “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.” In a brick-and-mortar bookstore, these categories provide booksellers with multiple shelving options.
BISAC categories are tools for bookstores to manage the relationship between a book and a potential reader’s expectations. Entering a bookstore is entering a space organized by these zones of expectation. If my book is shelved under “Biography and Autobiography,” readers will anticipate narratives based on actual life events. But this raises a question: can “LGBTQ+” lives, particularly a transsexual life, truly fit within the confines of “Biography and Autobiography,” or does this category inherently impose a cisgender framework on life writing?
There’s always been an attraction to books that defy easy categorization, that playfully engage with genre, subvert reader expectations, and unlock uncategorized desires. Similarly, the most compelling scholarly works are those that resist neat disciplinary boundaries, evade assigned keywords, and challenge the proprietary nature of knowledge. With Love and Money, Sex and Death, the intention was to create tension within categories like “Social Science / LGBTQ+ Studies—Transgender Studies.”
Shelfie #2. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023.
Furthermore, there’s an appreciation for books that bridge the gap between scholarly and “trade” publications. However, this crossover is increasingly challenging in what Dan Sinykin, in Big Fiction, terms the “conglomerate era” of publishing. Smaller publishers, and academic presses with their less favorable discount rates and lack of free shipping, face hurdles in getting their books onto bookstore shelves, the Autozone of book retail.
Writing trade books, especially for conglomerates, involves constraints. The pressure is to replicate past successes. Early in the process, particularly when proposing a trade book through an agent, authors are asked to provide “comps” – comparable titles that performed well. This contrasts sharply with academic publishing, where novelty and differentiation are emphasized. In trade publishing, the goal is to demonstrate similarity to proven sellers.
Initial attempts to pitch Love and Money, Sex and Death as a trade book to conglomerate publishers yielded limited interest. One assistant editor, a white cis gay man from an Ivy League background, expressed conditional interest, suggesting a more conventional memoir format. This encounter highlights the limitations of “diversity” within conglomerate publishing. Ultimately, the book found its home with Verso Books. My editor there, Leo Hollis, understood the project and guided it without demanding conformity, leading to a satisfying collaboration.
Verso’s distribution through Penguin Random House, the largest conglomerate, offers better terms for booksellers compared to academic presses. This provides a favorable balance: independent-publisher freedom with conglomerate-publisher distribution. The main limitation is the absence of the massive publicity machinery that conglomerates reserve for a select few titles each season.
Navigating the Weirdness of Autofiction in the Literary Marketplace
The sales challenge is compounded by the book’s unconventional nature. In later writing, a deliberate turn towards what can be called autofiction and/or autotheory emerged. While not always considered strictly respectable, these forms possess their own allure. Autofiction, as understood here, involves a character sharing the author’s name or attributes, but without aiming for a truthful self-portrait in the style of memoir or autobiography. Selfhood itself is viewed as a construct, and the writing explores the very process of its fabrication.
Autotheory is closely related to autofiction. Both prioritize the perceptual. Autofiction leans towards the affective aspects of perception, while autotheory emphasizes the conceptual. It’s more useful to consider autofiction/autotheory as tactics rather than rigid genres, and as a continuum of approaches. Let’s call it “autotextual”: These practices shaped this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances, influenced this particular trajectory.
The author’s name within the text becomes a vacant signifier, a point in the perceptual field around which the narrative of its creation unfolds. Love and Money, Sex and Death isn’t intended to reveal the hidden depths of McKenzie Wark’s inner life. Instead, it aims to illuminate a specific media and cultural era, the societal forces of family, class, and sexuality that contributed to the formation of the legally recognized entity known as McKenzie Wark. The author is not the divine architect of this life or text, but rather a created being, curious about its own making.
This shift towards autotextual writing was circumstantial. Moving from Sydney to New York brought feelings of isolation and disconnection. The job at Binghamton University was a four-hour drive from Brooklyn, requiring weekly commutes. While happily married and in love, the familiar Sydney community and sense of cultural purpose were lost. There was also the looming uncertainty of unemployment after the visiting professorship ended.
During periods back in New York, a state of dissociation prevailed – partly culture shock, largely gender dysphoria. A handheld GPS device, a gift from Christen before smartphones dominated, became a tool for grounding. GPS coordinates were recorded in notebooks, alongside writings about the specific place and time. This practice eventually evolved into the book Dispositions (2002).
Dispositions explores the tension between the abstract nature of GPS coordinates and the concrete details of scene, setting, mood, and atmosphere associated with those coordinates. It captured a sense of a world increasingly abstracted by information vectors capable of deploying economic and strategic forces globally. The book culminates in the aftermath of 9/11, with the author and Christen wandering through the disaster site, its final words: “This dust, she says, this dust is people.”
Post-9/11, New York State faced financial strain, and so did the author. The Binghamton position was eliminated. The best alternative was a composition teaching role at SUNY Albany, closer to Brooklyn but more expensive and less lucrative. After a year, a position opened at Eugene Lang College, The New School, offering a significantly higher salary and a three-year contract. The SUNY Albany tenure track, requiring full-time relocation and another book publication (despite already having three), was rejected.
The Lang College opportunity proved fortuitous. The college was expanding, and tenure eligibility was extended beyond the graduate faculty. Having chaired the Media and Culture Department and published two more books with Harvard University Press (A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007)), the author became a strong tenure candidate.
A Hacker Manifesto wasn’t conceived as an academic book. It emerged from engagement with the 1990s digital media avant-garde, a movement aiming for media revolution through politics, art, and theory. It sought to articulate a language for a nascent class, those generating information as difference, a labor distinct from producing commodified sameness. Rejected by many publishers, it was sent to Lindsay Waters at Harvard out of desperation. He responded within days, making publication a reality.
Gamer Theory serves as its darker counterpart, adopting the persona of “gamer” rather than “hacker.” It grapples with the feeling, sensed in Dispositions, of a planetary enclosure within a “gamespace” of zero-sum competition. It reflects insights gained from the independent game designer subculture.
These books are connected to the autotextual, focusing on collective rather than individual subjectivity. They aim to refresh language, defamiliarize subjective experience, and find language for emerging realities. While the hacker’s autopoietic worldview has faced setbacks, the gamer’s enclosed world has become dominant.
Marxism felt increasingly outdated, a scholastic imitation of itself, largely confined to academia. An attempt was made to revitalize it with fresh language and forms. This proved successful, with both books selling well. A Hacker Manifesto was widely translated, leading to engagement with diverse readers sharing a commitment to contemporary struggles. However, this also resulted in excommunication from certain orthodox Marxist circles, a paradoxical situation of a party-trained Marxist being denied membership in a non-existent “party” by those who mastered its classics in academia.
Following Gamer Theory, subsequent books aimed to circulate materials often marginalized by academic Marxism. The Beach Beneath the Street (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration (2013) explored the legacy of the failed 1968 revolution. Molecular Red (2015) examined the grand-scale failures of modernity in the Soviet Union and the United States, through the lens of dissenting Marxist currents.
The author’s intellectual, political, and emotional upbringing was rooted in the labor movement. By the late 70s, a sense of defeat was already palpable. Taking praxis seriously necessitates acknowledging these defeats and moving beyond theoretical clichés, drawing on alternative resources from the past.
Another book in this series is envisioned, focusing on British Marxist scientists and their social milieu from the 30s to 50s, figures largely erased from the Western Marxist canon, a disabling omission. The Anthropocene necessitates rethinking the relationship between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and between geological and historical time. These erased figures offer valuable, albeit compromised, resources for our times.
Enough books have been written for two academic careers. As a provincial outsider lacking in ring-kissing skills, a stellar, prestige-laden academic career was never likely. (Vanity suggests talent was sufficient.) Teaching focuses on undergraduate liberal arts and some master’s students. Ultimately, the preference is to be a writer of the city, New York. Leaving for purely professional advancement was never tempting. Staying put as the waters rise is the chosen path.
Beyond career missteps, credibility in media studies was further diminished by transitioning as transsexual. Dysphoria became unbearable, leading to a “late transition.” This involved having one’s cake and eating it too, even if slightly stale.
From a position of middle-class comfort and security, the decision was made to write whatever felt compelling. Hence the autotextual sequence, starting with Dispositions. The next was accidental: publication of email correspondence with Kathy Acker in I’m Very Into You (2015), a dialogue between two individuals intuitively sensing a shared, though then unrecognized, transness. This was followed by Reverse Cowgirl (2020), Raving (2023), and now Love and Money, Sex and Death (2023).
Criticisms of the autotextual as narcissistic, self-absorbed, and symptomatic of neoliberalism abound. These are often rhetorical dismissals, collapsing everything into a monolithic symptom from which the critics claim exemption. However, a different reading is possible. Compelling autotextual writing achieves one or both of two things: it reveals the processes of self-making and creates space for selves that are otherwise marginalized.
Shelfie #3. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023.
Transsexuals, for example. Simply stating existence on the page can be an act of defiance. So many others claim authority over trans narratives, objectifying and silencing trans voices. Pathologizing “expert” discourses and stereotypical portrayals in fiction are common. Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger was engaging until its trans character appeared, a collection of clichés. Third-person narration often relies on a presumed ignorance between writer and reader, and the implicit assumption that the subject of writing cannot also read and write.
These thoughts circulate while schlepping up Broadway, between bookstores, for signings and selfies. A self-aware, off-brand Marxist engages in self-promotion to sell books. Professional photoshoots, social media maintenance, readings, signings, podcasts, interviews – all are part of learning contemporary media by active participation. Embracing this fully feels less hypocritical than feigning detachment from the commodity form. To foreshadow: critical (auto) theory is preferable to hypocritical critical theory.
Labor, Commodities, and the Writer’s Tactics in the Book Autozone
There are two Marxist perspectives: one seeing everything as capital, the other seeing everything as labor. The latter perspective is adopted here. The commodity form obscures the fact that it is always the product of socially organized labor.
Consider Love and Money, Sex and Death. It appears as a commodity in the bookstore, an Autozone of literary goods. A purchase results in a revenue split: roughly 40-45% to the bookstore, 20% to the distributor (Penguin Random House), 25% to the publisher (Verso), and less than 10% to the author. Countless forms of labor are involved: booksellers, shippers, warehousers, printers, and within Verso Books itself – editors, copy editors, designers, production managers, publicists (now unionized). The author’s relationship to this labor is defined by a contract assigning rights to Verso in exchange for an advance and royalties.
One could critique the commodification of this entire process. Writing and bookmaking become subordinated to profit extraction from collaborative labor. The commodity form transforms writing’s potential for textual difference into the reproduction of sameness, enforced by categorization that disciplines difference into repetition.
Commercial publishers prioritize risk minimization, which can lead to creative stagnation. Occasionally, they take calculated risks on something different. Success then leads to imitations, with agents and editors seeking similar “comps.” Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts‘s success exemplifies this trend.
Autotextual writing, though existing under various names for some time, is often portrayed as a recent “autofiction trend” in publicity. A capital-centric Marxist interpretation might view autofiction as market logic dictating the writing process, equating it with neoliberalism, reality TV, selfies, narcissism, and neoliberal capital.
Such a “undialectical” Marxism, focused solely on capital, sees sameness everywhere, a lazy and ironically “neoliberal” approach. It interprets market appearances as allegories of capital, reducing everything to capital. This echoes neoliberalism’s core tenet: we are all “human capital.” Hence, “Neoliberal Marxism”: everything is capital, and that’s inherently negative.
However, from a labor-centric Marxist perspective, writing is work, producing difference. A written work becomes a commodity only if it possesses measurable difference. The trade publishing paradox: books must be different enough to be saleable “intellectual property,” yet similar enough to past successes. An industry exists to train writers in this balancing act: how-to books, workshops, MFAs, and agents who market writers like used cars in the literary Autozone.
What strategies are available to writers? One is refusal: remaining on the industry’s periphery, working with small presses and decommodified writing and reading circuits. Political publishing collectives are valuable but often short-lived and face distribution challenges. Nonprofit publishers, often foundation-funded, have their own agendas, supporting diversity but within limits.
Another tactic is writing in-and-against dominant market forms, through the contradictory experiences of creative life in contemporary gamespace. Compelling autotextual writing engages in this, making the process of its own creation evident in both form and content. It’s not the only such tactic, but a potentially fruitful one.
Writing is labor, but the nature of that labor is elusive. While hours spent writing in cafes contribute, writing also happens during dance, sex, or showers. What part constitutes “work”? How does life shape writing? Autotextual writing can be a means for creative workers – the hacker class – to communicate about the interconnections between life and art practices.
The Power of Perspective and the Autotextual in the Literary Landscape
Autotextual tactics are available to any writer, including problematic figures like William Burroughs and Norman Mailer. However, it becomes particularly compelling when employed by those historically excluded from the category of “creative human,” those whose very right to exist as humans is contested. Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is an early example: prison writing, homosexual writing, perhaps even trans writing, where the writer is brought into being through the act of fabulating their writing situation.
Stripped of stylistic flourishes, this tactic reappears in French gay writing: Hervé Guibert and Guillaume Dustan, the latter’s minimalist prose influenced by Marguerite Duras’s later autotextual works like Writing, a text explicitly about writing. Annie Ernaux’s now-renowned work, such as The Years, encapsulates postwar French experience through the perspective of a provincial woman.
Privileged writers within the literary establishment might also turn to autotextual tactics, particularly women whose talent is often undervalued. Renata Adler’s Speedboat and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, both from conglomerate publishers, exemplify this. While their relationship to feminism is complex, these books foreground the practice of writing as a woman, for whom the separation of writing from lived experience, often assumed by male contemporaries, was not possible.
Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction offers a different perspective with Percival Everett’s Erasure. Everett’s previous book, Frenzy, was pigeonholed as “Black writing,” a reductive categorization. Erasure then tells the story of a Black writer pressured into self-marginalization by an industry that restricts certain subjects from achieving the Icarus-like ambition to encompass the totality of experience.
Frank Wilderson III’s Incognegro is a powerful work, interweaving his middle-class Black upbringing with his involvement in the South African struggle. It’s often overlooked that this foundational Afropessimist’s bleak view of ontological anti-Blackness as modernity’s original sin stems from direct experience of the labor movement’s failures in South Africa.
The autotextual as a means of connecting personal and political dimensions forms a distinct subset of tactics, exemplified by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands / La Frontera, Audre Lorde’s Zami, and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. These works explore the negotiations involved in building solidarity across difference, navigating the intersection of queerness and comradeship. All emerged from small presses, relatively free from conglomerate publishing’s categorical constraints, those implicit rules of the literary Autozone.
Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s anthology, The Writers Who Love Too Much, provides a valuable entry point into the New Narrative writers, highlighting the collective creation of both a gay milieu and a related writing community. Theory and gossip intertwine on the autotextual page.
Several trans writers have embraced the autotextual, from Juliana Huxtable’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland to Aurora Mattia’s The Fifth Wound to T. Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. It serves as a tactic for trans writers to communicate with each other, sharing the work and play involved in writing both their books and their bodies into existence.
The scandal of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick wasn’t just its sexual frankness, but its discussion of money. Kraus, along with Hedi El Kholti, steered the theory publisher Semiotext(e) towards the autotextual, introducing French queer authors like Guibert and Dustan, and publishing Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, a meta-autotext on the complex writing/living situation of modernist women. I’m Very Into You and Reverse Cowgirl also found publication through these connections.
Semiotext(e) also published Kathy Acker’s Hannibal Lector, My Father., featuring early autotextual texts alongside Sylvère Lotringer’s insightful interviews where Acker articulates her autotextual theory and practice. Philosophy for Spiders (2021) attempts to show how Acker pushed writing beyond conventional public discourse in two directions: towards the intensely personal and the highly abstract, capable of discussing masturbation and post-capitalism in the same sentence.
Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie becomes clearer in this context. It moves from self-administering testosterone to a theory of postwar capitalism centered on the pharmaceutical and pornographic production of sex. Explicitly Marxist, it critiques Italian and French “cognitive capitalism” theories by focusing on genderfuck radicals whose commodified experience is not reducible to “cognitive” labor.
Shelfie #4. Photo: McKenzie Wark, 2023.
Testo Junkie is a key influence on Raving, both connecting specific practices to the real abstractions of the contemporary world. Starting from practices allows for appreciating the diversity of lived experiences and labor. Solidarity requires mutual appreciation of difference. It reveals the historical contours of the totality we inhabit and labor within, a totality that appears to be mutating. Or, as argued in Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (2019).
Ultimately, different situations and working methods shape perceptions of this totality. The autotextual is most effective when it transcends the particular, reaching for a particular-universal, the totality as seen from a specific viewpoint. This differs from the universal-universal of third-person narration, the unknowable totality of totalities. Writers are not omniscient; the autotextual is creation made secular.
Reading autotexts involves tracing connections between particular-universals produced through diverse working methods, fostering a comradely production of knowledge. This is the approach taken in General Intellects (2017) and Sensoria (2020), both dedicated to analyzing the work of others who have generated compelling particular-universals from varied situations and methods.
Beyond First and Third Person: Embracing the Second Person in the Literary Autozone
Third-person narration risks a detached, flyover perspective that erases particulars. First-person narration risks confinement to the particular, obscuring a sense of totality. What about the second person?
The epistolary form has always been intriguing, a tactic used by writers from Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo to Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. It is surprisingly prevalent in recent trans writing, such as Kay Gabriel’s A Queen in Buck’s County, Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran. Second-person narration directs the writerly self away from itself, towards the other, modeling modes of interpretation for the book’s other reader.
This is particularly useful for trans writing when addressing readers, even trans readers, accustomed to perceiving transness through a cis gaze that objectifies and silences. Thus, Love and Money, Sex and Death is structured as a series of letters to mothers, lovers, and others, exploring practices of self-making and self-becoming within historical, political, and cultural constraints.
Not critical theory, but critical (auto) theory. Disenchantment has grown with academic Marxism that has become dogma. For Roland Barthes, a proponent of critical (auto) theory, doxa is the transformation of history into nature, leading to resignation: “It’s always been this way. It just is.” Marxist doxa becomes the belief that not only is everything capital, but capital’s essence is eternal and unchanging, with only appearances shifting. The world of appearances, senses, labor, play, and practices is then seen as derivative of an essence observable only by the sage critical theorist from a detached position.
Critical (auto) theory is not presented as a superior ethical alternative. On the contrary, touring bookstores to promote a book is an embrace of the contradictions of being both within and against the commodity form, the literary Autozone. Motivations are mixed: praxis and a desire for attention and royalty checks.
For Marxism to remain relevant, it needs to become more accessible, more common, grounded, and “ill-bred,” finding refuge outside the academy, which has shaped it in its own image more than acknowledged. Liberation is a continuous cycle of defeat and renewal. When theory fails practice, practice should inform theoretical renewal, as history shows: “mature” Marxism emerged after the defeats of 1848.
These are different times, facing a rise of fascism. What is our vision of the good life? Perhaps it lies in fragments of everyday life lived without dead time – during sex, dance, aimless wandering, glimpses of a different city, a different life. Let’s write that.
